Comments

I've never had to go above 4.
Your lights seem very bright to me and raising the bias seems to have helped but it might cause problems elsewhere with shadows.
I often find it is a act of balancing several things.

I actually dialed them down a lot. The Backlight is typically very bright. I have the UE2 set at 52.6%. The Key Light is at 75%, Fill: 25%, and Backlight at 150% (that's a normal settup with the back light double the intensity of the key light).

I used some of the tricks I learned at Dreamlight to get this settup. Not all, mind you, but some.

okay, I KNOW where those lines came from: It was the shadow softness. So: here are my materials, with the specular dialed down to 50%. The Shadows at 1% soft on Shadow Mapped Shadows... I'll be replacing the lightset I have posted on ShareCG and I'll be posting these materials for y'all to play with.

My Lightset has been updated on ShareCG, but all you really need to do if you already have it, is select all three lights, and jack down the Shadow Softness to 1% or until the shadow lines disappear...

Sorry no it doesnt always fit I have my shadow softness up high and don't get the lines if I do I reduce the Subsurface scale.
That render above shadow softness was at about 30%

When this render finishes (and after I've had some sleep) I'll run some more test on other scenes I have that have the stripes but my current render seems to have improved by dropping the shadowsoftness from 60 to 30% (I know maybe 60% was a bit high :P)

besides at the very least weve established that shadowsoftness is a factor with SSS just like shadow bias.

My Lightset has been updated on ShareCG, but all you really need to do if you already have it, is select all three lights, and jack down the Shadow Softness to 1% or until the shadow lines disappear...

Wow. So glad I found this thread. I bought the same set a while ago, and had the same lightbulb head effect going on... I couldn't figure it out, so I stopped using it. Reading this has very much helped me. Wish they had better documentation and product review section so folks could read this valuable info.

Hehe... now we have to try to tackle making BLACK Skin look good in DLight with SSS! That is TOUGH!

I'd start by changing the subsurface colour either a reddish orange or maybe even (fairly) dark red depending on the skin tone. The darker the skin the darker the subesurface. The colours are a rough guesstemate but I'm fairly sure it's the subsurface colour you want to be changing

I played and played with subsurface colour and ambiant colour. I have ambiance for my skin set at 5% to defeat shadows on the face, and I'm hoping I don't have to eliminate that for dark skinned characters. I still haven't got satisfactory results. (Nudity Warning) this is what I have atm posted at Deviant Art:http://wancow.deviantart.com/#/d5nmmox

I've just had something very weird happen, I did a render and there were none of those lines on the characters but I decided I didn't like the look of the clothes - so I altered some of the settings and maps for the clothes and rerendered; and the lines appeared on the characters very obviously.
I altered several things, one at a time including the bias but the lines continued to appear. I deleted the clothes the lines disappeared.
I undeleted the clothes the lines came back.
I deleted the clothes and then loaded a fresh set - the lines dissapeared.
Something I did to the clothes caused the lines which really seems bizarre.

after carefully reading all the replies, this is what i come up with.
the shadow bias really solved the spotlight problem, but the overall look is still not very satisfying to me

i think the essential problem is that Daz Studio still lacks a suitable shader model for human skin or a kind of modular shader thing like the one they had as of poser 9

E.g. if there was a way to specify the sub surface scattering depth, the torchlight problem wouldnt occur. or even a possibility for using dermal and subdermal maps would be great. in a program that focuses on character design, things like that should be a priority ;)

i dislike the way the highlights look, i have seen much better renders and i lack the knowledge to tweak them into something more nice.
also achieving that sexy "wax"-like skin look is very hard.

The Omnifreaker Human Surface shader treats the surfaces much differently.

You can find them under My Library/Shader Presets/Omnifreaker/Human Sufrace/

Make sure you have Genesis selected in the scene tab and the materials you wish to switch out in the surfaces tab. Highlight all the skin surfaces, hold down the control key, and double click on Human Surface. Change Replace to Ignore in the dialog box. Re-apply your interjection, then render. See what you get.